The result is that authors end up assuming
potentially life-destroying liability, are chilled from quoting
material around them, and are scared off of public domain texts
because an honest mistake about the public-domain status of a
work carries such a terrible price.
* Posterity vanishes. In the Eldred v. Ashcroft Supreme Court
hearing last year, the court found that 98 percent of the works
in copyright are no longer earning money for anyone, but that
figuring out who these old works belong to with the degree of
certainty that you'd want when one mistake means total economic
apocalypse would cost more than you could ever possibly earn on
them. That means that 98 percent of works will largely expire
long before the copyright on them does. Today, the names of
science fiction's ancestral founders -- Mary Shelley, Arthur
Conan Doyle, Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, HG Wells -- are still
known, their work still a part of the discourse. Their spiritual
descendants from Hugo Gernsback onward may not be so lucky -- if
their work continues to be "protected" by copyright, it might
just vanish from the face of the earth before it reverts to the
public domain.
This isn't to say that copyright is bad, but that there's such a
thing as good copyright and bad copyright, and that sometimes,
too much good copyright is a bad thing.
Pages:
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41